Awesome Aurora Pictures and 4th of July Activities

Here is the link to Robert "Ice Man"  Schwarz's pictures of the aurora this winter so far. They are awesome, he probably has the most experience photographing aurora of anyone in the world.

In other news it has been below -90 F for about a week and below -100 F for about three days now. The coldest is got was -108 F. (That's only 9 degrees from the all time record.) We warmed up again to -97 F today. When fuel is exposed to these temperature for a prolonged period of time it starts to gel up. All of the out buildings that are run off of fuel tanks are gelling up and the heaters can't keep up with the temperatures so many of the out buildings are holding around 40 F. The vehicle fuelling module (VFM) has gelled up (fuel has even gelled up in the 1.5 inch fuel lines) and we can no longer fuel equipment with it. To get fuel into equipment to be able to fuel the out buildings, fuel has to be siphoned from the main fuel tanks in 55 gallon buckets. These fuel tanks are under the ice in the arches at a constant -65 F so the fuel is still a liquid. When it is this cold equipment can't be run outside for very long and has to be brought back inside, or else the steel could get too cold and could shatter like glass.

For the 4th of July we had a "summer carnival" and a cook out style meal. Notice that California poppy on the dessert tray, they finally started blooming! There was a homemade two hole mini golf course, ping pong, a homemade cotton candy machine, snow cones (the snow came from outside), pin the tail on a Chihuahua with the radio comms guys head photoshopped onto it (this is one of our winter crew inside jokes, it's a bit of a story to explain that one). We watched "Sandlot" in the gym and it was good time.

This is the winter site manager, me, and the "Ice Man" trying to fix the cotton candy machine. The machine is made with a heat gun, and a rotating element run off a car battery. It's been around for a while but it's a good example of classic South Pole ingenuity. It actually works okay, but it could be improved upon.